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Will Israel be the first cashless society on the entire planet? A committee chaired by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff has come up with a three phase plan to “all but do away with cash transactions in Israel”. Individuals and businesses would still be permitted to conduct cash transactions in small amounts (at least initially), but the eventual goal is to force Israeli citizens to conduct as much business as possible using electronic forms of payment. In fact, it has been reported that Israeli officials believe that “cash is bad” because it fuels the underground economy and allows people to avoid paying taxes. It is hoped that requiring most transactions to be conducted in cash will reduce crime and help balance the national budget. And once 98 or 99 percent of all transactions are cashless, it will not be difficult for the Israeli government (or any other government) to go the rest of the way and ban cash transactions altogether. But is a cashless society actually desirable? This is a question that people all over the world will have to start asking as governments increasingly restrict the use of cash. (Read More...)

The former chief economist at the World Bank, Justin Yifu Lin, is advising the Chinese government that the time has come for a single global currency. Lin, who is also a professor at Peking University, says that the U.S. dollar “is the root cause of global financial and economic crises” and that moving to a “global super-currency” will bring much needed stability to the global financial system. And considering how recklessly the Federal Reserve has been pumping money into the global financial system and how recklessly the U.S. government has been going into debt, it is hard to argue with his logic. Why would anyone want to trust the United States to continue to run things after how badly we have abused our position? The United States has greatly benefited from having the de facto reserve currency of the planet for the past several decades, but now that era is coming to an end. In fact, the central bank of China has already announced that it will no longer be stockpiling more U.S. dollars. The rest of the world is getting tired of playing our game. Our debt is wildly out of control and we are creating money as if there was no tomorrow. As the rest of the world starts moving away from the U.S. dollar, global power is going to shift even more to the East, and that is going to have very serious consequences for ordinary Americans. (Read More...)

The demand for physical gold is exploding all over the world, and bullion banks are now experiencing a supply crunch that is absolutely unprecedented. As physical demand continues to rise, the massive Ponzi scheme that the bullion banks have been engaged in is going to become increasingly obvious, and at some point the lack of physical gold is going to break the back of the paper gold market and we are going to see the price of gold go to levels that we have never seen before. You see, the truth is that the central banks of the world and the bullion banks have made “paper promises” that vastly exceed the amount of actual physical gold in existence. This kind of scheme works fine if everyone does not come asking for their gold at the same time. Unfortunately for the ones running this scheme, people are now starting to ask for their gold back and it is causing huge problems. (Read More...)

Is the paper gold scam about to be brutally crushed by a crippling shortage of physical gold? If so, what will that do to global financial markets? According to the Reserve Bank of India, “the traded amount of ‘paper linked to gold’ exceeds by far the actual supply of physical gold: the volume on the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) OTC market and the major Futures and Options Exchanges was OVER 92 TIMES that of the underlying Physical Market.” In other words, there is a massive amount of paper out there, but very little actual physical gold to back it up. And right now, we are witnessing voracious hoarding of physical gold all over the globe. This is especially true in Asia. Just see this article and this article. All of this hoarding is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on those that have made all of these “paper promises”, because the truth is that there really isn’t all that much physical gold on the planet. In fact, Warren Buffett once estimated that if all of the gold in the entire world was brought into one place, it could be formed into a cube that would only be 69 feet long by 69 feet high by 69 feet wide.(Read More...)

Do you actually believe that the central banks of the world are going to sit back and do nothing while their monopoly over money creation is being threatened? Do you actually believe that the governments of the world are going to allow a digital currency that they have no control over to become “the future of money”? If so, then you are incredibly naive. Wars have been started over much less. The global elite are very, very sensitive when it comes to the creation of money, and Bitcoin has definitely gotten their attention. Yes, there have always been alternative currencies created by local communities, but none of those has ever been a real threat to the central banks of the world. The truth is that Bitcoin is different. It has the potential to really be something, and I expect a serious move to be made against Bitcoin before it explodes in popularity. If Bitcoin was solely a domestic currency, the U.S. government would have already shut it down long ago. The fact that it is a decentralized international currency makes things trickier, but without a doubt right now officials are thinking of ways to restrict the use of Bitcoin or shut it down altogether. Bitcoin is already being portrayed as a currency that attracts criminals involved in such things as tax evasion, drug dealing, gambling, terrorism and money laundering. In fact, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Treasury Department has ruled that money laundering rules will be applied to Bitcoin. But this is just the beginning. (Read More...)

Are we witnessing the start of a historic financial meltdown in Europe? In recent days, two massive corruption scandals have greatly shaken confidence in European financial markets. The first involves Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. It is being alleged that he has been receiving illegal cash payments, and the calls for his resignation grow louder with each passing day. The second is a derivatives scandal at the third largest bank in Italy. Allegedly, there were some very large unreported derivatives deals that were supposed to help hide losses at the bank, but instead they actually made the losses much larger. The investigation that is looking into this derivatives scandal is starting to spread to other banks, and nobody is quite sure how far down the rabbit hole this thing goes. But what everyone does agree on is that this derivatives scandal has shaken up Italian politics, and the outcome of the upcoming election is now very uncertain. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is rapidly rising in the polls, and the European establishment is less than thrilled about that. Meanwhile, stock indexes all over Europe fell rapidly on Monday, and even the Dow was down 129 points. So will all this blow over in a few days, or is this the beginning of a full-blown stock market crash in Europe? (Read More...)

Do you want to know what QE3 is going to do to the price of gold and the price of silver? Well, you can read what the financial experts are saying below, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is likely to happen. During QE3, the Federal Reserve will be introducing 40 billion new dollars that have been created out of nothing into the financial system each month. So there will be more dollars chasing roughly the same number of goods and services, and that means that more inflation is on the way. In an inflationary environment, investors tend to flock to hard assets such as gold and silver. And it is important to remember that a lot of the money from QE1 and QE2 ended up pumping up the prices of various financial assets. This included commodities such as gold and silver. The same thing is likely to happen again with QE3. In addition, investors now have an expectation that the Fed will continue printing money for the foreseeable future and that the U.S. dollar is going to steadily decline, and that expectation will also likely give further momentum to the upward movement of gold and silver. Of course when it comes to investing, there is never a “sure thing” and as the global financial system falls apart in the coming years we are likely to see wild swings in the financial markets. So there is definitely an opportunity when it comes to gold and silver, but anyone that wants to invest in gold and silver needs to be ready for a wild ride. (Read More...)

Ready or not, QE3 is here, and the long-term effects of this reckless money printing by the Federal Reserve are going to be absolutely nightmarish. The Federal Reserve is hoping that buying $40 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities per month will spur more lending and more economic activity. But that didn’t happen with either QE1 or QE2. Both times the banks just sat on most of the extra money. As I pointed out the other day, U.S. banks are already sitting on $1.6 trillion in excess reserves. So will pumping them up with more cash suddenly make them decide to start lending? Of course not. In addition, QE3 is not likely to produce many additional jobs. As I showed in a previous article, the employment level did not jump up as a result of either QE1 or QE2. So why will this time be different? But what did happen under both QE1 and QE2 is that a lot of the money ended up pumping up the financial markets. So once again we should see stock prices go up (at least in the short-term) and commodities such as gold, silver, food and oil should also rise. But that also means that average American families will be paying more for the basic necessities that they buy on a regular basis. The most dangerous aspect of QE3, however, is what it is going to do to the U.S. dollar. Most of the rest of the world uses the U.S. dollar to conduct international trade, and by choosing to recklessly print money Ben Bernanke is severely damaging international confidence in our currency. If at some point the rest of the world rejects the dollar and no longer wants to use it as a reserve currency we are going to be facing a crisis unlike anything we have ever seen before. The real debate about QE3 should not be about whether or not it will help the economy a little bit in the short-term. Rather, everyone should be talking about the long-term implications and about how QE3 is going to accelerate the destruction of the dollar. (Read More...)

There are more Americans dependent on the federal government than ever before in U.S. history. According to the Survey of Income and Program Participation conducted by the U.S. Census, well over 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. Many are enrolled in more than one. That is about a third of the entire population of the country. Sadly, that figure does not even include Social Security or Medicare. Today the federal government runs almost 80 different “means-tested welfare programs”, and almost all of those programs have experienced substantial growth in recent years. Yes, we will always need a “safety net” for those that cannot take care of themselves, but it is absolutely ridiculous that the federal government is financially supporting one-third of all Americans. How much farther do things really need to go before we finally admit that we have become a socialist nation? At the rate we are going, it will not be too long before half the nation is on welfare. Unfortunately, we will likely never get to that point because the gigantic debt that we are currently running up will probably destroy our financial system before that ever happens. (Read More...)

Global leaders have tried just about everything that they can think of, but the coming global financial catastrophe continues to march steadily toward us. We have seen “stimulus packages”, quantitative easing, bond buying, interest rate cuts, emergency economic summits, bailout packages for banks, bailout packages for entire nations, “Operation Twist”, unprecedented government intervention in business and massive amounts of new government debt and yet nothing seems to revive the global economy. In fact, it looks like we are rapidly heading into the second dip of a “double dip recession”. Unfortunately, many believe that this next dip will be more like a full-blown depression. All over the world, top economic experts are warning that we are facing an unprecedented crisis of debt and insolvency that will result in a global financial catastrophe. The eurozone is drowning in debt, the U.S. government is drowning in debt and major banks all over the globe are drowning in debt. Global authorities have been trying to patch the system together and keep it going, but the incredible damage that all of this debt has done is now becoming apparent to everyone. The global debt bubble that has fueled prosperity in the western world for the last several decades is getting ready to burst, and when that happens the chaos that will result will be absolutely horrifying. (Read More...)